Nvidia's Tesla P100 does not use the full Pascal GPU core

Nvidia's Tesla P100 does not use the full Pascal GPU core

Nvidia's Tesla P100 does not use the full Pascal GPU core

Nvidia's Tesla P100 does not use the full Pascal GPU core, with 256 GPU cores being left out of the design. This many mean that "Big Pascal" may be able to offer a full 11.3TFLOPs of single precision performance.

Right now Nvidia has been very clear that the Pascal-based Tesla P100 uses only 56 SM units, but when looking at Nvidia's pascal GP100 core design we can see that there is a total of 60 SMs available, meaning that there are a full 256 Pascal GPU cores that will be unavailable in the Nvidia P100.

Nvidia may not be using the full GP100 pascal GPU core in the Tesla P100 for many reasons, but it is very likely that it is due to yield issues with the new GPU design. The Nvidia GP100 core is the largest that I have ever seen from Nvidia, with a die size that is 610mm squared, making it larger than even the Titan X's 601mm squared core design. This GPU is also the first Nvidia GPU that has been shown that was made using the TSMC 16nm FinFET processing node and the first to use HBM 2.0 memory, making this new GPU core design much more complex to manufacture.

This GPU is also the first Nvidia GPU that has been shown that was made using the TSMC 16nm FinFET processing node, which is a new processing node from TSMC, and is the first Nvidia GPU to use HBM 2.0 memory, making this new GPU core design much more complex to manufacture.

With HBM 2 being a larger size than HBM 1 per chip and Nvidia's GP100 GPU core being so large it looks like it will be a very difficult task to fit all of this hardware on a single interposer, likely stretching the current tolerances of this technology to their limits. Just look at the picture below to see how close the four HBM 2.0 chips are to the GPU core if you want to see how tightly packed this GPU design is.

Below we have looked at the specifications of Nvidia's Tesla P100 and Nvidia's GP100 core design to list the specifications of Nvidia's full GP100 GPU core though many of the specifications remain unknown at this point.

Right now we do not know if Nvidia will use larger capacity HBM 2 chips on GP100 in the future, as we do know that 8GB HBM chips are due to be manufactured this summer allowing a potential 32GB GP100 based GPU to be released in the future.

We also cannot comment on what clock speeds will be possible in future GPUs using the GP100 GPU core, as we do not know if Nvidia's stated 1328MHz/1480MHz base and boost clocks are conservative on Nvidia's part or not. For all we know later Pascal chips could run at 1600MHz+ boost in the future if the chip overclocks well.

Tesla K40

Tesla M40

Tesla P100

Full GP100

GPU Core

GK110 (Kepler)

GM200 (Maxwell)

GP100 (Pascal)

GP100 (Pascal)

SM Units

15

24

56

60

Cores Per SM Unit

192

128

64

64

FP32 CUDA Cores

2880

3072

3584

3840

Base Clock Speeds

745MHz

948MHz

1328MHz

-

Boost Clock Speeds

810/875Mhz

1114MHz

1480MHz

-

Texture Units

240

192

224

240

VRAM Cappacity

Up to 12GB

Up to 24GB

16GB

-

Memory Interface

384-bit

384-bit

4096-bit

4096-bit

Transistors

7.1 billion

8 billion

15.3 billion

15.3 billion

Die Size

551mm^2

601mm^2

610mm^2

610mm^2

Manufacturing Process

28nm

28nm

16nm

16nm

Right now Nvidia states that the P100 is in volume production and that the chip will be selling first to the supercomputing market in June 2016 and will be arriving with OEMs in Q1 2017.

Nvidia has stated that they are not currently planning on releasing the GP100 GPU core in a Geforce GTX part but given the fact that the GK110 and GM200 GPU cores eventually became GTX Titan series GPUs and later GTX X80 Ti series GPUs it seems likely that this GPU will eventually hit the market as a future flagship GPU when production yields and volume make it affordable.

Most Recent Comments

You can expect the consumer version to be much more toned down. Fully enabled cores but no HBM2 as well as dropping NVlink. They more than likely only went all out because the servers/cloud/supercomputer market for them is much more profitable. No consumer could afford a GPU with this many features. Dropping HBM2/NVlink and I think we have our TX but with some more cores.Quote

HBM2 and NVlink will probably stay as it would mean redesigning the chips to get rid of them.

Titan card will probably have all the cores enabled and the Ti version will possibly have specs similar to the OP but with higher clockspeeds.

Don't think gamers will see any of this until 2017.

Well they could drop it. Don't think NVlink is part of the core. It's on a separate pcb that they can drop the die in. If HBM2 stays, late 2016/early 2017 is when it will launch. If they decide to have a separate consumer build then expect GDDR5(or 5X depending on launch date) and probably costing around $1000-1500)

I think this time they will make a bigger gap between Titan and Ti. They should at least, people will pay for it and make a bigger profit so business wise it would work.Quote

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